HOLLY PECK

Founder WOMEN WHO CODE INC., VANCOUVER Research scientist SANCTUARY AI AGE: 27

LIFE STORY: Dara Djafarian was accepted to medical school but opted for business instead. “As much as I love medicine, I always enjoyed the opportunity to bring businesses and ideas to light and make them commercially viable and real and interesting and applicable to society,” he explains.

When Djafarian was five, he and his sister, Lily, moved with their parents from London, England, to Vancouver's North Shore. Vancouver is home to Djafarian's cousins and uncles on his mother's side, including Shahram and Peter Malek, principals of Millennium Development Corp. Djafarian attended Collingwood School in West Vancouver, then Mcgill University for a bachelor of arts and sciences specializing in biomedical sciences, before returning to the U.K. to complete a master of technology entrepreneurship at University College London in 2012.

Back in Vancouver, Djafarian became an associate at Vanedge Capital Partners Ltd. and met a group of scientists and investors involved in a research project that needed commercialization. He joined Creatus Biosciences in 2015 as director of business operations, becoming president and a board member the following year.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Creatus Biosciences is a biotechnology company that has genetically engineered a new species of micro-organism to produce compounds from xylose sugars with applications in such industries as biofuels and food additives. Creatus has filed eight patents in the U.S. and other countries and obtained $3 million in funding plus grants and credits. –F.S.

LIFE STORY: Karine Samson has big plans for Optimal Efficiency, the Vancouver-based startup she founded in 2015. The company, which makes project management software for construction, mining and energy-sector firms, aims to capture a sizeable chunk of its multibillion-dollar market. It's a bold ambition that is grounded in facts and figures, explains Samson, an engineer by trade. She earned her civil engineering degree from Quebec's Université Laval in 2012, and spent three years working on construction and mining sites in Northern Quebec and Alberta. Samson began Optimal Efficiency as a side project. “I saw all the inefficiencies on the job site and the miscommunication between different parties involved in construction projects,” she says. When she spoke with others in her field, they told her she could radically streamline her outdated industry by delivering superior software and processes. Born in the small town of Beaumont, Quebec, Samson quit her Calgary-based job to launch her business in software talent–rich Vancouver.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Optimal Efficiency has received funding from private equity investors and from government sources such as the National Research Council's Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP). The company employs 16 people and launched its first product iteration at the beginning of this year. –D.H. LIFE STORY: Brianna Blaney's business acumen is evident from her first venture: a community newspaper she started with one of her five siblings and a couple of her cousins when she was 11 years old. The crew wrote the papers and forced them on their North Vancouver neighbours by dropping them off in mailboxes. That effort was impressive, and so was the foresight to get out of the print trade. Instead, after graduating from UBC with a Bcomm in 2012, Blaney got into the recruitment business with Vancouver-based TPD Resources Ltd. and saw an opening in the market she knew she could fill.

“Recruiters are highly incentivized to make placements just to make commission; it's not focused on actually doing the right thing,” she says. “We help businesses tell their stories.” Her business, Envol Strategies, prides itself on helping smaller companies establish themselves as brands and desirable places to work, for lower fees than the big recruiters.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Vancouverbased Envol, which has satellite offices in Toronto and Calgary to complement its Gastown HQ, earned almost $500,000 in revenue in 2017, its first year of business. Now employing five full-time staff, the company has joined the Entrepreneurship@ubc incubator to build artificial intelligence–powered human resources technology. –N.C. LIFE STORY: For someone so young, Connor Meakin has led a few different lives. The Vancouver native played 45 games for Canada's national field hockey team while completing a psychology degree at both Uvic and UBC in 2012. When Meakin hung up his cleats, he took an internship at a small startup called Hootsuite, becoming one of the social media management firm's early full-time employees. After a couple of years learning under Ryan Holmes and company, he knew he wanted to run his own business; he just wasn't sure what it would be. Then in 2014 came a blessing in disguise: a foot injury while he trained to run ultra-marathons competitively.

“I was kind of frustrated with Western medicine not having a solution to fix my foot, and I looked into the more natural ways of eating and healing the body, and bone broth was one of the things I found,” says Meakin, who launched Bluebird Provisions and its first product, Pure Bone Broth, in 2016, using his own savings. Bone broth is made by simmering bones in water to create a soup-like mixture that can be sipped, but Meakin's product only uses bones that are on their way to the landfill. It's the first and only organic bone broth to be sold in grocery stores nationwide.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Bluebird's bone broth now sells in 140 stores across Canada, including grocers like Choices Markets, Urban Fare and Whole Foods Market Inc., and it's aiming to move into the U.S. by 2019. The company's annual revenue is well into six figures. –N.C.

LIFE STORY: Growing up in Lynn Valley and travelling with her parents to the jungles of Belize and Costa Rica as a child, Ainsley Rose developed an intense desire to protect nature. In Grade 4, she spoke at a District of North Vancouver council meeting about the potential impact of developing the greenbelt behind her home. Her father, a patent and trademark lawyer, and her mother, a nurse, encouraged her to follow her own path and find a career that she felt served a greater purpose.

While studying psychology at UBC and working as a server at night, Rose began taking on photography clients. She travelled the world shooting images for publications from British Vogue to Real Weddings and New Zealand's Magnolia Rouge. In February 2016 on a photo shoot in Mexico, she and a friend, Hannah Todd, decided to create a product that was sustainable but stylish. They tracked down a silky fabric made in Taiwan from recyled plastic bottles at an Oeko-tex–certified textile mill for their minimalist swimsuits, which are made in a factory in East Vancouver. Fans include former The Bachelor contestants Whitney Bischoff and Kaitlyn Bristowe, plus Riverdale's Asha Bromfield.

THE BOTTOM LINE: By January, Londre had sold more than 450 swimsuits. Projected 2018 sales are $155,000. With four subcontractors, Ainsley Rose Photography generates $120,000 a year. –F.S.